This invention relates to an expert system simulator for modeling that is especially useful for training personnel in the medical and related arts. More particularly, the invention pertains to such a system or systems in which a person interacts with the system to interject information that is utilized by the system to establish extremely realistic simulations of the "look and feel" of certain surgical and therapeutic procedures which may be prescribed by physicians and surgeons for certain patients.
In the past, exploratory surgery was often performed merely to determine the pathology that created otherwise unexplained symptoms, but such surgery exposed patients to complications of trauma and infection that were entirely unrelated to the original complaint. Accordingly, ways have been sought to better determine medical conditions and treat them effectively without resorting to invasive diagnostics.
Modern medicine has given rise to an increasing number of highly sophisticated non-invasive and semi-invasive procedures that are performed on patients for diagnostic, therapeutic and microsurgical purposes. Such procedures are often performed in a very brief period of time on patients who either may not require or be capable of being fully anaesthesized or hospitalized. For many of these techniques and procedures such as arthroscopic surgery, therapeutic endoscopy and coronary angioplasty, for example, it has seemed that the only way for a practitioner to master the necessary skills and required techniques was through experience on live subjects.
Live patients have seemed essential in practicing semi-invasive methods because the normal pressures in arteries or tracts and other vital functions, are necessary to the passage of instruments and the reaction of the living organs. Moreover, it is essential that there be relevant patient responses which are important, if not crucial elements of successful procedures. Accordingly, there has been a tendency for the already experienced physicians to be asked to perform whatever operations or procedure that are necessary, and it has been difficult for inexperienced physicians to obtain a desired level of competence. Moreover, even where a physician has performed a given procedure from time to time, there is the need to maintain a high degree of skill that is possible only through recent experience. Accordingly, there has continued to be a need for a substitute way of providing real-life experience on a current basis without the necessity for obtaining that experience on living persons.
Proposals have been made to simulate living conditions in non-living substitutes, illustrative of which are the proposals made in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,345 granted Nov. 23, 1982 to David Hon. According to the proposals of that patent, there is provided a computer-controlled interactive instruction system for teaching an individual how to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation. However, laudatory as those proposals may have been, they were structured toward comparing a technique being administered to a dummy with standard indicia stored in the computer memory and did not propose operator defined surrogate invasive travel within the subject. Moreover, since they were structured to specific performances and external responses, they did not provide for complete and non-restricted environmental modeling of potentially encounterable conditions, nor did they contemplate the internal realities of surrogate conditions. In other words, the proposals of the prior art were concerned with highly structured instructional procedures in which external indicia were compared with standard indicia and the results displayed to the student. Accordingly, there continued to be a need for simulation that is life-like and that provides a full range of indicia that may be encountered when performing surgical procedures on living persons.